Atlantis

by John Cowper Powys

  “Something decisive for good, though it is also heavy with the opposite of good, is on the verge of happening,” and as Pontopereia tried in these crude words, which she repeated twice over to herself in silence, to express what a breath of wind was now uttering in her ears and uttering a good deal more often than twice, she was suddenly arrested and fascinated by something else. It was a peculiarity of hers to make much of all the chance-shapes and accidental formations that presented themselves whether out-of-doors or in-doors; and what she saw now struck her as a real omen. The Dryad’s blackened square of earth, which one general darkness of night had already made part of itself was scrawled over by a thin streak of light from the aperture at which she herself crouched, a streak of light with which chance or destiny was now inscribing, according to the lettering of a language not wholly different from hers, the fitful outlines of a disturbing “N”! Did this “N”, the girl wondered, refer to Nisos or to Nausikaa, or possibly even to Nosodea the mother of Leipephile?

  “It is in accordance with the ancient custom of our Grecian islands,” the Midwife was now saying—indeed she had been uttering sentence after sentence ever since she first appeared but in such a loud, pontifical, assured, self-confident voice, that it was as if she were addressing a crowd of people outside who had no connection with Odysseus or with these two women or with Zeuks or with Nisos.

  Odysseus, who had not taken the faintest notice of what the midwife was saying, now suddenly addressed the pregnant woman herself. “Your pains have not begun yet, have they, my dear?” The question was a foolish one and an extremely masculine one; for it was obvious that the pregnant woman’s sister whose profession it was to deal with such cases would not have left her quite unassisted while she harangued the world; but there was clearly something about the exhausted creature that appealed to the old king.

  Nausikaa rose from her seat. “Where’s that old nurse of yours,” she enquired; “the one you introduced me to a while ago? Hasn’t she got a room in the palace where a poor woman like this can rest in peace and wait her hour?”

  Odysseus put down his wine-glass and looked round the room. “Nisos!” he cried. “Please go down to the kitchen and bring Eurycleia up here. I want to talk to her.”

  Nisos leaned forward and whispered to the occupant of that grotesque chair, while the chair itself, as he did so, seemed to be perceptibly projecting its roots into the floor and its stag-like horns towards the roof.

  “Shall I do what he says?” he whispered to Zeuks, “or shall I pretend not to hear him?”

  It was Zeuks himself, however, who at that moment pretended not to hear Nisos; for in his own mind Zeuks was thinking, “Why is it that it gives me no great thrill to know I am the son of Arcadian Pan? Is it because it doesn’t make me immortal and independent of death? In such great matters we men are like animals and do not understand what is going on. If it did make me independent of death it would still be impossible for me to feel independent of it. And what benefit do I get from being the son of a god, I should like to know, when I feel exactly like everybody else?”

  These thoughts so dominated Zeuks that they gave him the sensation that he was lost in them and that his personality had disappeared and that it was the chair he sat in that thought these thoughts and that he was merely the name for the language the chair used. The chair, in fact, thought in Zeuks instead of in Greek!

  It was indeed the fact that Nisos had actually knelt down with both his elbows propped on the arms of this singular chair where tree-root-legs and hooded covering of stag-horn seemed so much more alive than the man who was sitting in it, that rendered both himself and Zeuks so lost to all that was going on that it wasn’t until quite a crowd of Nisos’ relations were standing round them, nor until the Midwife herself had commenced a formal supplication imploring the goddess Athene to return to them in Ithaca that the spell was broken.

  Roused at length from his trance Nisos was amazed to see quite close to him not only Nosodea, the mother of Leipephile, but Leipephile’s elder sister Spartika, the priestess of Athene, as well as the old man Damnos Geraios. His amazement indeed had hardly reached its peak when lo! standing alone behind the lot of them, but with the half-protective, half-mocking gaze he knew so fatally well fixed steadily upon himself he saw his own mother!

  Pandea looked just as calm, just as confident and self contained and just as serenely poised, as if she had been in her own house. That she was in the presence of the king did not apparently disturb her; nor, though her shrewd gaze was fixed on her son, did she seem at all concerned when without taking the least notice of any of the new-comers Odysseus repeated his command that the young man should hasten to the kitchen and fetch Eurycleia.

  When at length Nisos did remove his elbows and release his fingers from the clasp of entranced prayer, and stiffly and painfully lifted, as if his limbs had been in peril of growing as inanimate as the wood-work above them, first one knee and then the other from the floor, he found that the wave-length of excitement was still concentrated on the almost stellar arena where the old warrior’s beard with Zodiacal precision was pointed first towards Okyrhöe and then towards Nausikaa.

  It certainly was not pointing towards Zeuks or towards this enigmatic chair; though the words by which Nisos had been ordered to fetch Eurycleia were still echoing in the boy’s head. No; that bowsprit beard had turned away from them all and was now quivering like a moonlit spear-head over broken water towards the towering figure of the white-robed Spartika.

  “Has the old man forgotten,” Nisos thought, “that he has told me to fetch Eurycleia; or is he getting blind and doesn’t see me at all and fancies that I’ve already gone down there? Or do the wisest old men, even when they’re as wily as he is, when between two ladies like those two and a jug of wine such as he’s got there, grow queer in the head? O gods above and gods below!” the boy’s thoughts ran on as he pretended to be too absorbed in the condition of his friend Zeuks to make any response either to his mother’s questioning concern or to the echo in his ears of the king’s unobeyed command, “What on earth”, he wondered, turning his gaze with such a rapid jerk that he made it impossible to meet his mother’s eye, “What on earth is Spartika up to?”

  It was evident to everyone there, except perhaps to Zeuks, who had fallen into one of his deepest gulfs of egoistic self-questioning, that the king was amazed by this apparition of Spartika in her white robes, chanting rather than repeating her religious message to them all.

  Nisos had acquired the habit, shared by most of his friends and relations, of thinking nothing of Spartika. To disparage her religion, to question her devotion, to minimize her gifts, to underrate her sincerity, to make sport of the grave intensity she always put into her worship of Athene had been the general custom ever since this girl grew up, among everybody who knew her.

  It is indeed one of life’s mysteries how this can happen with certain particular young people; and it happens to young men as often as it does to young women. The Goddess herself, however, had encouraged this young priestess of hers from the very start; and it had in recent years become a familiar joke in the Temple that if you wanted to catch a glimpse of the Goddess of Wisdom you would have to cast yourself down in front of the small side-chapel altar which it was Spartika’s duty to decorate with fresh flowers.

  If on the contrary you wanted to avoid any risk of encountering the formidable Goddess the thing to do was to say your prayers at her High Altar on the day when the Priest of the Mysteries of Eros and Dionysos was paying his perfunctory and conventional visit to the centre of the island’s traditional worship.

  As Nisos turned at this moment towards Spartika, praying that his mother wouldn’t see through his pretence that he hadn’t seen her, and that Odysseus wouldn’t see through his pretence that he hadn’t heard his command, he was relieved of one of his nervous fears by noticing that the pregnant fugitive from Italy had gone to sleep in the chair wherein her sister had ensconced her and that, though the poor lady
’s snores made old Damnos Geraios grin like a water-sprite, nobody else appeared to bother about her at all. Her midwife-sister was apparently absorbed in listening to Spartika’s speech; but whenever the impassioned priestess paused to take breath the midwife would interpolate some high-pitched moralizing of her own. Nisos however found himself in a very short time heartily wishing that the midwife would hold her tongue; for it began to strike him more and more strongly that Spartika had been grossly underrated.

  “O Great Goddess of Wisdom,” prayed the white-robed figure, “send to thy faithful and devoted worshippers the power to hold fast amid all troubles and tribulations and against all enemies and traitors, and against all chances and accidents, and against all famines and pestilences and elemental disasters, that imperishable gift of pure reason which alone can assauge and mitigate and allay all the ills that our human mortality brings with it! Return, return, O greatest of all Goddesses, thou who wast born of the divine head of the son of Kronos, thou who hast merely to shake the tassels of thy glorious, equitable, thrice-holy Aegis, and all the howling, ravening, raving, blood-drinking, bone-cracking, flesh-devouring minions of mischief who serve the bigots, the dogmatists, the maniacs, the fanatics, the inquisitors who dominate this maddest of all possible worlds are scouted and routed into headlong flight!

  “Here in this ancient hall while our world-famous king is entertaining two beautiful princesses and while Pontopereia the daughter of Teiresias—yes, my sweet child, I see that you’re listening to me from your perch like a sea-swallow blown inland before its time in that high window seat!—here, I say, in this old hall, while our king is entertaining his beautiful visitors, have you, his faithful people, forgotten—hast thou our wily sovereign thyself forgotten—the noble, the heroic, the pure, the devoted, the religious-hearted Telemachos, son of Odysseus, son of Laertes.

  “What, I ask you, is wrong with all you people, that you are dividing yourselves now into these accurst divisions, some of you wanting Odysseus to rot like a wounded stag till he lies dead in his bed and makes way for Krateros Naubolides, or for Agelaos, son of Krateros Naubolides, the betrothed of my own sister Leipephile, and some wanting him to catch the ears of the whole world with his voyage across the drowned Atlantis to unknown shores beyond the Ultimate Horizons, but none of you, no! not even thou thyself, O King! thou infinitely heroic and infinitely wise lord of adventure by land and sea!—have even so much as considered the claim of this noble, this calm, this beautiful, this dignified, this profoundly intellectual, this spiritual-soul’d, pure-minded only son of Odysseus and Penelope!

  “Why, I ask you, my friends, why, I ask you, my sisters and parents and neighbours, why, I ask you, my wily, secretive, many-natured, much-experienced, much-enduring, invincible Odysseus, have you narrowed down this ridiculous dispute to whether an old man is to risk mixing his bones with the bones of the lost populations of drowned Atlantis or is to be allowed to walk in the forests in sunshine and moonlight to listen to the winds and the waves, to survey the motions of the stars and risings and settings of the sun and the moon until he is buried by the side of his faithful wife, when all the while, only a few leagues away, there abides in the deep contemplation of the secret wisdom of the Great Goddess whose shining temple we have among us, the only son of this heroic king and his noble wife?

  “I know well that Telemachos seeks no kingship and no kingdom. I know well that Telemachos has his courts and his palaces, his lands and his waters, his armies and his fleets in the high invisible world of the ancient philosophers and thinkers of the human race. I know very well that all you servants of our old heroic king, and thou O King thyself, I know would be with thy servants in this, would have difficulty in persuading Telemachos to add to the intellectual labours of his philosophical life by undertaking the more active and practical burdens of kingship.

  “I know very well too that he has great respect for my sister’s betrothed suitor, Agelaos Naubolides. But he is a much older man than my sister’s Agelaos and if our old and much-enduring adventurer—I speak with all respect, most noble king!—were never to return from this incredible voyage upon which he has fixed his heart, his soul and his unusual brain—according to the natural ways of life it seems quite likely that my young friend Agelaos would not have to wait so very long for his turn at the game of Kingship. Therefore let us all, let every one of us, I say, be prepared for the future in the strength of our great Goddess Athene!”

  Here the tall girl bent her head, smiled at her mother, Nosodea, who was taking the whole thing with the utmost matter-of-fact placidity and had just moved to the side of the pregnant woman who was now awake again, and quietly accepted the chair which the declamatory Midwife, talking quite hilariously now, dragged to her side.

  And then, to Nisos’ relief, Odysseus, who himself had risen from his seat and moved up close to the pregnant woman’s side, once more requested him, but quite gently and apparently taking for granted that his earlier orders had been unheard, to hasten at once to the kitchen and fetch Eurycleia.

  “And tell her, my boy,” the old king added, “that I’d be glad if she could make up a bed for this woman so that her child can be born, even if the birth is delayed for a day or two, somewhere within these walls.”

  Lifting his head and straightening his shoulders while he whispered a hasty assurance to Zeuks that he’d be back in a pulse-beat, Nisos was just starting on this quest when Odysseus made a sign that he would like a private word with him before he left the hall. When he obeyed this sign and was standing so close to the old man that he could smell the wine he’d been drinking and even feel his own chin tickled by the foremost hairs of that still undaunted and still defiant beard, the old man took advantage of the Midwife’s formidable back being momentarily bent over her sister to whisper to his young emissary that it was extremely likely that the father of this expected infant was none other than that king of the Latins whose defeat by Aeneas and his Trojan followers had, it seemed, led to the founding in Italy of a New Troy upon a group of Seven Hills, not without the aid of the most famous of all cave-nymphs and not without the help of human infants nourished by the dugs of wolves!

  “So you can tell our nurse, my boy, if you find her in a difficult mood, that this baby, if a bed is made for its mother here, may turn out to be the heir to all the riches of the Italian Peninsula!” It was at that moment that Nisos became aware that his own mother, Pandea, was cautiously, slowly, obstinately, threading her way towards him, for, drawn as women always are, by the twin-shadows of birth and death, the wife of the rival claimant to their island-throne had naturally an extra magnet tugging at her bosom in addition to the loadstone weighted by both birth and death.

  But so quickly had it got about among the neighbours that the most romantic as well as the most human of all the old king’s adventurous lady-loves had suddenly arrived along with Ajax, son of Telamon, regarded by all the world as dead, that popular curiosity, most of all in the women, had already crowded the corridor and the steps with people and was now filling the dining-hall.

  Pandea had always been one of the most neighbourly and gossip-loving of ladies and this made her present passage through the crowd to reach her son Nisos by no means rapid. She was in fact caught by the belt and by the folds of her gown at every step.

  At any moment now Nisos could have hurried off, thus obeying the king, escaping from his mother, and precluding any untimely labour-pains for the woman here; but he suddenly felt himself powerfully seized by the left wrist. It was Odysseus. “Where,” cried the old man in a husky, agitated voice, “where, in the name of all the gods, is Ajax?”

  All Nisos could do in reply to this, for in his intense desire to outwit Okyrhöe, and in his new and sudden alliance with Arsinöe, he had forgotten Ajax altogether, was to blurt out all he knew.

  “Zeuks told me just now,” he cried, “that he had found him dead and had buried him with his own hands.” The one word “Where?”, which the old king uttered on hearing this in a ver
y curious tone, left a queer and complicated impression on the mind and nerves of Nisos. The boy could see that to the old man at this moment the idea of being confronted once again by his ancient comrade in arms of those long years of the Trojan War had touched something in his soul that was deeper and more essential and more important to him than all his romantic feeling for Nausikaa and all his libidinous feeling, or emotional feeling, or companionable intellectual feeling, for Okyrhöe.

  The figure of Ajax, as the old man recalled it now, acted like a magic talisman upon him, restoring to him a whole existence of thoughts and sensations, of undertones and overtones of feeling, of desperations and ecstasies, so utterly remote from all he was experiencing at this moment that to plunge into them, and swim about in them, and inhale great draughts of their encircling atmosphere, was a startling shock.

  Odysseus was indeed so affected by this sudden mental vision of Ajax that the one single view of himself and his whole life that he could endure, and that struck him as ground firm enough to fall back upon at a crisis, was the view of himself that accompanied his present resolution to sail across the ocean that had drowned Atlantis. This intention, this purpose did alone, the old man felt at that moment, justify his existence as nothing had done since in rivalry with the rest of the Greek leaders he entered Ilium in the Wooden Horse.

  Escaping from his king therefore, with almost as much relief as he escaped from his mother, for he felt a sudden longing to be plotting and planning with Arsinöe again, Nisos pushed his way hurriedly through the crowd and was soon pleading passionately and eagerly the cause of the unborn babe, who might turn out to be the inheritor of the longest-descended racial tradition in Italy. “Well, if he’s set his heart on it,” the old lady finally conceded, “there’s nothing to be gained by thwarting his wishes. O you men! you men! He has no notion, nor, I expect, have you, closer though you are than he is to the womb out of which you all come, how near to her pains this woman is, but if——”